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What is ballet? Twenty-five years or so ago, people thought they knew. Ballet was the Russian Ballet, as revealed to the West by Diaghilev and his successors; it consisted largely of one-act works of the type invented by the choreographer Michel Fokine. Fokine had not only created an enormous number of new ballets, which were staple items of the repertoire. He was also thought to have created the New Ballet, based on reforming principles which he himself had enunciated.

     His memoirs (1) show that he himself originally thought he had inaugurated a new era in ballet, sweeping away frivolous and inartistic earlier works. Later he came to see, to his bitter regret, that younger choreographers broke or ignored his cherished principles. One of these was that dancing and mime have no meaning unless they are used to express dramatic action; another was that ballet should allow for complete equality with the companion arts of music and scenic design. For years it became generally accepted that dance, drama, music and decor are more or less equal ingredients in this thing called ballet.

     Now, however, Fokine’s works no longer form the basis of any repertoire. One of them, ‘Les Sylphides’, has certainly become a ‘must’, being performed by every company from the largest and most established to the smallest touring groups. It is danced far more often, in far more countries, than any other ballet, though most of these performances would not have satisfied Fokine or his principles. ‘Carnaval’, ‘Spectre de la Rose’, ‘Prince Igor’, ‘The Firebird’, ‘Petrouchka’ and ‘Scheherazade’ are all revived fairly frequently, but none of them are really top favourites with today’s ballet public. The rest of Fokine’s eighty ballets are almost entirely forgotten. His very success in fusing all the arts, and in taking such care over production details, makes his ballets more elusive and more difficult to revive successfully than works which depend simply on dancing. (One may be shocked, but one can surely understand the question put by the ex-Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev after seeing his first ‘Firebird’ recently at Covent Garden: ‘But where is the choreography?’)

     Instead of Fokine’s works, ballets which break or ignore his principles now dominate the repertoires of the world’s leading ballet companies. These ballets are the old pre-Fokine classics, the new full-evening works modelled on those classics, and modern ‘abstract’ ballets. Dancing for its own sake, which Fokine regarded as a frivolity, is more popular than ever and ballet dancers have reached new heights of applause-winning virtuosity. The ballerina’s short tutu, which Fokine called ‘repulsive’ and thought fit only for the Follies, has become even shorter and more revealing. And so on . . .

     Has ballet slipped back, then, into the decadent state it was assumed to be in before Fokine raised it to the level of Art? Or were the claims made by and for Fokine exaggerated and misleading? I suspect that many of the older generation of ballet-goers and critics still cling, consciously or unconsciously, to Fokine’s principles, on which they were reared. This probably accounts for the poor critical reception given in London to the New York City Ballet (whose repertoire consists almost entirely of George Balanchine’s ‘abstract’ ballets), for the disappointment expressed in many quarters about such Frederick Ashton ballets as ‘Les Deux Pigeons’ (which uses a naïve story and an undistinguished, though tuneful, score as excuses for original and exciting dancing), for the bewilderment caused by the Leningrad Ballet (whose productions clearly subordinated decor and drama to the dance), and for the general feeling of dissatisfaction which pervades much writing about present-day ballet.

     This dissatisfaction is made explicit, for example, by Mr A. V. Coton, one of the most senior and experienced British critics, in his contributions to a controversial new symposium (2) which discusses this and many other problems of ballet today. He pleads specifically for a return to Fokine’s principles.

     Yet what do these principles mean in practice? They mean an attempt to restrict ballet to one particular form — the highly integrated, expressive one-act work in which Fokine himself excelled. Let us see what happens if we apply the principles to the contemporary repertoire.

     The old classics are ruled out because they are too artificial. The dramatic action is interrupted by irrelevant pas de deux and divertissements, by applause and by dancers taking calls. The costumes are usually inappropriate to the period and social status of the characters; the story is told in stereotyped conventional mime.

     Of course everyone will agree that the classics should be produced as convincingly as possible, though I doubt if many people would really want Giselle or Swanilda to be dressed precisely like a peasant girl. But surely all these conventions which Fokine condemned are just as easy to accept as any of the other conventions which we must inevitably accept every time we go to the theatre. Ballet, in particular, must of its nature be a highly artificial and conventional art; it can never be wholly realistic, thank goodness. I do not believe it is any more difficult to be convinced and moved by Swan Lake or Giselle, for all their artificialities and conventions, than it is to believe in Fokine’s puppet Petrouchka coming to life or his Spectre of the Rose dancing with a sleeping maiden.

     The new ‘abstract’ ballets are ruled out because ‘dancing has no meaning in ballet unless it is expressive of dramatic action’. What nonsense this is! Balanchine, Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and others have shown us that movement can have meaning just by adding an extra dimension to music, that it can be aesthetically satisfying like painting or sculpture, or physically exciting like athletics. They have shown too that human emotions can be engaged without any specific dramatic action. Even Fokine’s ‘Les Sylphides’, evocative though it is, can hardly be said to have ‘dramatic action’.

     Ballets without scenery or costumes, performed against plain curtains or a cyclorama in practice dress, are presumably ruled out too, for violating the equality of ballet with scenic design. Yet a moment’s thought shows that ballet can exist without decor; it can even exist, some choreographers have shown, without music. It obviously cannot exist without movement; there can no more be ballet without movement than opera without singing. Therefore the quality of the movement invented by the choreographer of a ballet, and the quality of its execution by the dancers, are not of equal importance with the other ingredients; they are paramount.

     This argument does not diminish Fokine’s importance as the creator of a new type of ballet, which made history and enriched the international repertoire, influencing all his successors. The point is that he did not change the whole nature of ballet, as he himself thought. He did something much more valuable — he extended it. As Mr Clive Barnes argues, our modern choreographers are now combining many of the virtues of Fokine with those of his predecessor Petipa and, given adequate financial support, they will continue to develop and enlarge the nature of ballet. One of the glories of ballet is its variety. It cannot be restricted, as various pundits keep trying to do, to pure dance, or to mime-drama, or to lyrical poeticism, or to the perfect blend of dance, drama, music and design. It embraces all these things, and may embrace many more besides.